Parents want to control their children's computer experience in the home. Home computers can increase learning rates and task efficiencies. However, children often show a greater appreciation for the nearly limitless types of entertainment and recreation provided by home computers and the Internet. Computers offer increasing capabilities that parents may wish to monitor: DVD players, CD players, live chat rooms, local and network games, emails, shopping sites, web surfing, etc. Unfortunately, current parental control features with respect to computers are limited. Parents currently may impose some restrictions on Internet usage and some application usage. In addition, these restrictions are machine-specific and do not roam as a child uses a different computer.
Parents want the ability to extend computer privileges to their children in a similar fashion as any other privilege. A child is generally given few privileges and is monitored constantly when young. As the child matures, she may be allowed additional computer privileges. Parents want their children to be protected and yet have freedoms and responsibilities corresponding to their maturity. To this end, parents need the ability to incrementally allow children access to appropriate functions of a home PC. They also need to be able to temporarily extend or curtail these privileges. The parental controls should also be consistent for a child for every machine in the house. To date, no solution exists which can offer parents such capabilities.